Ethusundír
by purple-pentapus
Summary: Time freezes for her, or at least starts to move slowly enough that when Loki breezes past she feels his lips on hers like they've been there for years and they're never going anywhere, even though she knows somewhere in the back of her head that she can taste his freezing skin for barely a second. Loki/Jane, slightly AU, set after the Avengers.
1. 1,001

_A?N: _so this story is slightly AU, the only real difference this far being that SHIELD kept the Tesseract at the end of the Avengers film.

_I climbed a tree to see the world_

_~Cinematic Orchestra_

Jane has a plan, but she doesn't think it's going to end well.

"Mr. Stark is in town to represent his company, Stark Industries, at an international technology conference at the Fairmont Olympic," reports the bottle-blonde newscaster, whose dress has apparently given up trying to conceal the top half of her enormous bosom. "Other corporations attending the week-long conference include Samsung Electronics, Hitachi, Siemens, Hewlett-Packard, Mitsubishi Electric, and China Mobile."

Jane folds her knees up to her chest and tucks them under her chin, her fingers lost in the sleeves of her enormous cable-knit sweater. Her hair is up in a sort of half-twist thing that's secured with a mechanical pencil that's out of lead, and some of it is falling into her face, so she swipes it away.

"The conference is a month-long collaboration between all of the multi-billion dollar companies in attendance," continues the newscaster, "that includes a two-day concept expo open to the public, as well as a think-tank session, the issue for which is yet to be announced."

There's a pause, and the bunker-sized lab crammed with more than a dozen workspaces falls momentarily silent, before the bleach-blonde woman on the tiny television screen turns her lipsticked smile on the audience and delivers her closing quip,

"That's the story, but I'm sure what all of us here in Seattle are wondering is: _Will Iron Man make an appearance this month?"_

The news show pans out strategically before cutting to its closing sequence, with _Kiro 7 Eyewitness News at 11_ proclaimed across the screen in orange and silver letters, and Jane reaches for her mug. She finds it balanced precariously on top of a stack of data sheets, and downs the remaining dregs of coffee in one gulp, doesn't so much as blink at the cooled, slimy feel of it as it slips down her throat.

The research facility is empty, darkened except for the small spot around Jane's desk that's illuminated by her small lamp and the flickering screen of the television she stole earlier from the next desk over. At the far end of the bunker there's a glass-walled room, and there's a pale blue light emanating steadily from there, but it doesn't reach far past the immediate area.

Maybe, Jane thinks, if it weren't so dark and lonely she wouldn't be thinking like a crazy person. Because when she's got no one to reign her in, her mind just _goes, _and doesn't stop even though she knows she's not a super-spy, and really there's no plausible scenario in which she could possibly pull this off.

Sighing to herself, she stands up, then hops a little because the concrete floor is more freezing than she expected it to be, and she's not even wearing pants long enough to cover her ankles, let alone socks – just her cotton pajama shorts that are spattered with cartoonish shooting stars.

She makes a dash for the break room, which is truthfully just a small kitchenette with a few card tables set out around it and a collection of mini-fridges to its left, careful not to stub her toes on anything in the relative darkness. The coffee-maker coughs and whines as it starts up, and she sets her mug under the nozzle to catch the splatters of caffeine that come before the machine gets going properly, producing a thin stream of black liquid.

Jane hops absently from foot to foot while her mug fills up, and glances around the kitchenette. There's not a whole lot lying around – the physicists that SHIELD employs are nothing if not neat and organized, she'll give them that – but there is a large paper tray out on one of the card tables, with the remnants of a chocolate cake.

Because the coffee-maker's still struggling to fill her super-sized mug, and because maybe all she needs is a little chocolate to whoop her in the ass and tell her _no, you can't sneak something that valuable right out from under SHIELD's nose, especially at twelve a.m.,_ she grabs a plate and plastic fork out of the overhead cabinet.

She cuts a big piece that includes the _D _and part of the _a _out of Darcy's name – all that's left of _Congratulations Darcy!,_ and slops it on the plate. The poor thing strains under the weight of the cake, drooping slightly to one side.

The coffee-maker tops off her cup with a theatrical spitting sound, and a beeping red light powers up on the keypad to let her know that it's finished. She sticks her fork between her teeth so that she has a free hand to carry the dangerously-full mug; walking back to her desk is more like inching, because she's not eager to spill scalding liquid down her front.

Jane sits back in her chair, and the news show has ended to give way to a late-night sitcom. She shovels a forkful of chocolate cake into her mouth and chases it down with a gulp of coffee before she's really finished chewing.

Her cake is rapidly disappearing, and pretty soon she's not going to have anything to do, because the readings on the one lit computer terminal – near the blue-lit room on the far side of the bunker – haven't altered in the slightest in months, and _would anyone really notice if she set the monitor on loop? _

She really shouldn't have volunteered for the night shift, but it's not as if there was any chance of her turning down the opportunity to sit in this laboratory alone all night with just her thoughts to accompany her, especially on the first night Darcy's not here to make her stop science and go to sleep. But then maybe she should go and get some sleep, before her brain starts to honestly try and figure out –

Jane sets her dishes down on the only flat area left on her desk – her keyboard – and stands up briskly. It takes a few minutes to navigate the enormous space and reach the glass-walled room, but if anything she only grows more determined with the short passing of time.

She reaches the door, which is reinforced glass as well and so largely indistinguishable from the panel it's set into, and her hand is hovering over the keypad for a full second before she remembers the twelve plus cameras in the surrounding area, all of which are trained on this very same door.

Pulling her hand back quickly, Jane glances up at the camera nearest to her, hung from the far-off ceiling by a long rod. It whirs mechanically, the lens dilating, and she knows it's running her face through the list of approved personnel.

She goes over to the large computer monitor off to the side of the front glass wall and pulls down the touch-screen keyboard from behind the screen. Darcy was the computer whiz around here, but she taught Jane a thing or two before leaving; with a few keystrokes she's stopped data output from within the room and set the scrolling numbers on loop. The display chokes up for a heartbeat, but then kicks back into gear.

A bout of nervousness chases itself down her spine, and she shivers from the bottoms of her feet up to the messy twist in her hair that's pretty much fallen out completely at this point.

This is crazy, _so fucking crazy,_ but then maybe she's just sick of being stuck in one place with zero progress in any aspect of her life, specifically in this project, and maybe now is the perfect time to do something.

She takes a deep breath and taps a few more keys, entering her personal security code to stop camera operations. Then she walks back around to the door and enters the code in the keypad, and a moment later the locking mechanisms on the thing click open, and an eight-by-three foot portion of the wall swings inwards.

She's been inside a number of times before, but this time she steps tentatively. The room is perfectly square, the walls made of a white tile that's some metal alloy that Jane can't identify because she does space-time, not metallurgy. In the center of the room there's a large, complicated-looking apparatus that's attached to the ceiling and the floor, with the entire department's centerpiece clasped in its secure core.

The Tesseract hums almost imperceptibly, giving off the pale blue glow that's the only illumination in the room. Jane debates turning on the light, but she's feeling jumpy enough as it is and doesn't need the added trepidation that some security personnel will patrol through the bunker and see her messing around in here.

She steps up towards the cube until she can feel the energy of it like a tingle on the tips of her fingers, like hairs pricking up on the back of her neck. She wants to reach out and touch it, but she figures stealing it is enough madness for one night, and so clenches her hand into a tight fist at her side.

"You're an idiot, Janie," she says to herself. The tone of her voice sounds like Erik's, or maybe her research partner's – the ones who are usually the voice of reason for her. "You're going to get caught, and go to some obscure prison in Siberia for the rest of your life, and die alone."

She swallows, and one last look over her shoulder, back out the glass wall and into the dim bunker, just to make sure that there's no one watching and she _really _doesn't want to go back to sitting around watching identical data for _hours. _After a beat, she moves into action.

There's a rack of cube-related equipment near the front of the holding room, including a row of stainless steel briefcases outfitted singularly for quick transportation of the Tesseract. Jane grabs one, and snatches a pair of thick rubber gloves that she slips on for protection; even then, she can feel the power of the cube on her skin, like tiny pinpricks of thrilling electricity.

She kneels on the floor in front of the Tesseract, and unclasps the case's lid, pulling it open. There's a foam setting inside, with a perfectly sized cutout for the cube to set in, and Jane feels like maybe she's been planning this in the back of her head for a long time, because something unfurls in her throat like she's relieved.

The Tesseract feels light in her hands, lighter than something of its size should feel, and she's infinitely careful as she transfers it down into its carrying case. She closes the lid, clasps it, and then shoves the rubber gloves into the deep pockets of her sweater, her movements too jittery to allow time to check that they're tucked in all the way.

She leaves the room a lot quicker than she came, stopping only for a moment to check that her work on the computer terminal is still in effect – the data input is still on loop and the cameras are still disabled. She finds herself jogging back towards the other end of the bunker, where the stairs and the elevator are, leaving the television set on and her dirty dishes deposited across her keyboard.

She's not being very sneaky, but then she's never kidded herself into thinking she was any sort of stealthy – more like uncoordinated and less-than-smooth. She takes the stairs two at a time and only trips once or twice; she wishes she'd had the forethought to slip her shoes on before bolting. The handle of the briefcase is cold against her palm, and she's probably just imagining things, but she thinks she can still feel that tingly sensation –

"Doctor Foster, where do you think you're going?"

- or maybe that's just the tingly sensation of_ you're about to get caught and sent off to wherever SHIELD sends treasonous physicists._

Jane freezes in her tracks, the balls of her feet catching on the rubber floor tiles, the baby-thin hairs on the back of her neck standing on end. She hasn't made it very far, just to the middle-ish of the hall that's directly at the top of the staircase – she still has something like half a mile of underground tunnels to work through before she makes it to the garage, let alone the main road.

"Doctor Foster."

She turns slowly, shifting the briefcase slightly behind her back even though there's not a soul in all of SHIELD who could be standing that far away and not have seen it already. It's the closest she's ever felt to being a protective mother, and it's kind of sad knowing that the thing she's protecting is a little blue cube.

"Agent Barton," she says. He looks at her unamusedly, and raises his eyebrows like he's waiting for her to say something. "I was, ah…" she starts to explain, "…taking a walk. Somewhere."

"Taking a walk," Barton deadpans back at her. "Needed the Tesseract for company, did you?" He steps forward, up and a smidge to the side so that he's towering directly over her. "I'm afraid I'm going to have to ask you to come with me."

Jane makes a face, because she really just wants to turn tail and run for the exit, maybe pull off some impressive action-flick acrobatics make a miraculous escape. She's had what feels like enough bad ideas for one night though, so she shuffles obediently along in front of him.

Barton opens a nondescript blue-painted door, and gives her an eye that clearly says _march, chickie._ She steps inside; the room is darkened, and maybe it's just her, but it doesn't feel very large, like she could reach out on either side and press her fingers to the walls. She thinks maybe they're just in another hallway, but then Barton steps in behind her and he's pressed up against her side pretty awkwardly.

He shuts the door and flips the light switch, and it turns out they're in some sort of supply closet. "So," says Jane slowly. "They sent you to kill me," and she's only half-joking.

Barton snorts, but it doesn't exactly sound like he's humored, more like he's just humoring her. "Not quite," he says, and she gets the feeling that he's had to kill wayward employees before. He steps around her an pulls open the door on a large cabinet that takes up the entire back wall of the room, then tosses a pair of chunky combat boots at her feet. "Put some shoes on."

She stares down at the boots in confusion for a long moment before moving hesitantly to step into them. They're honking enormous on her – her feet are just big enough that a couple inches of the front of her foot can hook under the top of the shoe. After hesitating a moment, she sets the briefcase down on the floor and kneels to lace up her newly-acquired footwear. "What's going on?" she asks while she's working.

Barton's leaning sideways against the cabinet, his arms folded across his chest and an equally closed-off expression plastered across his face. "Low-clearance employees don't actually have the ability to shut off security cameras," he says. "We were watching you the whole time."

Jane gets an uncomfortable squirming feeling in her stomach, something like betrayal even though she knows in the back of her head that she can't trust SHIELD. She pulls the last level of laces tight on her right boot and loops them into a bow; one end of string comes loose, and it ends up in a kind of lopsided knot, but she doesn't care enough to try and fix it.

"Command was ready to send in a whole squadron to take you down, but I volunteered instead." He smirks to himself and says, "No unnecessary violence, eh?" It's Jane's turn to snort, as she remembers the obligatory self-defense orientation class, in which Barton had taken it upon himself to throw an arrogant chemistry department recruit across the grappling mat.

"Okay," she says. "But why are you giving me boots? Shouldn't you be locking me up?" She sits back on her heels in a sort of awkward squatting position and pulls the briefcase containing the cosmic cube back towards her. It makes a scraping noise against the concrete floor, and Barton's eyes flicker down to it for a moment.

"I'm helping," he says, like it's obvious. "I agree with you."

Jane quirks an eyebrow. "You're helping me steal the Tesseract?" she asks incredulously. Somehow this newest piece of information doesn't fit right in her brain, even though it's not difficult to understand at all.

Barton pushes himself forward off the cabinet and takes a couple strides towards the closet door. "I'm helping you take the Tesseract to Tony Stark. That _is_ where you were planning on going with it, isn't it?" He puts a hand on the doorknob and gives her a pointed look. "Nice shorts, by the way."

She rises quickly to her feet, the briefcase back to its previous position at her side. One of the rubber gloves has started to fall out of her pocket, so she shoves it back in forcefully. "I still don't understand," she admits, a bit grudgingly.

He shoots her a distracted glance over his shoulder and holds a finger brusquely to his lips to signal for silence. Jane, who is quite frankly just glad to still be breathing at this point in her idiotic mission, complies.

"Tasha," mutters Barton, holding two fingers against his ear. "Go now." There's a brief pause, where he's stands so stilly that Jane is forced to remember that he's not just a SHIELD lackey, he's a trained assassin, and that's probably part of the reason he's not just following orders and doping her with enough tranquillizers to take out a small elephant.

Then he seizes her by the arm and heaves her out of the room at a breakneck pace, off down the hallway in the same direction she was going when he intercepted her. His legs are a good four inches longer than hers – she's never been a particularly tall woman – and he's practically dragging her along beside him, her feet going furiously across the tiles to keep up. It doesn't help that the boots he gave her are so overly-large on her feet – she keeps tripping, but he just hoists her into the air until she's fit to go on on her own again.

Her hair comes well and truly loose of its fastening pencil, and the freed thing flies to the floor. At last, they reach a set of closed space-age looking double doors at the end of the hall, and Barton doesn't bother to wait until they've slid fully open, just shoves her through the moment it seems wide enough and then sucks un his minimal stomach and squeezes through after her.

She starts to stumble forward, but Barton whips out an arm and hits her so hard in the chest she has the wind knocked out of her and her back slammed hard against the still-moving door. Her sweater gets dragged uncomfortably across her back, twisted across her midriff, and the briefcase clicks back against the door by her knee once, twice while it's swinging.

Barton looks sideways at her. He's barely broken a sweat, and his breathing is even and normal, unlike hers – she's breathing like she's just run a marathon in a fat suit, which is probably to be expected given that she _never _works out.

"We can only shut the cameras off for a minute at a time, and they're easier to shut off in sections, so we run," he explains. "Take breaks in the blind spots." She nods, and then it's silent, and this is not at all what she expected when she volunteered for the night shift.

It's quiet enough a minute later that she can hear a small female voice from the piece in Barton's ear. "Clint, you're a go in three, two, one – "

They take off again, and maybe because she has some sort of idea what's going on it's easier for Jane to keep up. At the end of the next hallway, Barton pulls her sideways through another nondescript doorway, only instead of ending up in a closet they find themselves in a concrete stairwell.

Barton bounds off down the stairs and she follows him, taking her time a bit more now that he's not sprinting, just sort of loping along at an easy jog. Their footsteps echo in the empty space, and Jane gets a terrified knot in her throat like there's someone following them.

She stumbles down the last few steps, under-anticipating the size of her feet in the combat boots, and Barton catches her and sets her upright. He looks like he's been down here for a while waiting, but he doesn't seem annoyed, just mildly amused.

"You missed your calling as a SHIELD agent, Foster," he pokes lightly.

Jane's struggling to catch her breath, leaning against the wall next to the door, but she manages to shoot him a sarcastic glare. "I'm an astrophysicist," she says haltingly, still gasping for air. "Not an athlete."

Barton snorts. "Clearly." He waits another minute, watching her suffer dispassionately, and then says, "Ready?" She looks extremely uncertain, so he adds, "There's a short hall, then we're into the parking garage and you just have to stay out of sight in the back of my truck until we're out of surveillance range."

Jane takes one last breath and lets it out slowly, then nods. It's a good thing they're not stopping for very long, she thinks, or she'd be nauseous with some sort of fear or anxiety or something by now.

She readies herself for one last sprint as Barton presses his fingers back to his ear. "We're ready," she hears. She flexes her calves a little in the short interim, like that will help her run faster, or something.

Then Barton shoulders the door open and she follows him out, his hand still wrapped around her arm to keep her at his side. They're through the hallway in a matter of seconds, and then it's a veritable blur of cars and miscellaneous vehicles, most of them painted black.

Agent Barton skids to a halt in back of a beat-up red Ford pick-up truck, and instead of pulling open a door or even the flap in the back like a normal person, he just seizes her by the waist and hoists her into the flatbed like she weighs nothing.

"Head down," he commands as he runs around to the driver's side. "Under the tarp." He yanks open the door and before he slams it closed she hears him murmur, "Thanks, Tasha. I owe you one." Then there's a sharp slap as the door closes behind him, and she scrambles to climb under the tarp.

Barton pulls the Ford out of his parking space, and as he drives out of the base's parking garage, he goes over a speed bump, and Jane's head ends up resting on the cables of a hunting bow, her feet in a bunch of broadhead arrows.

one, one thousand

A?N: Disclaimer: I do not own the Avengers. I do, however, promise some Loki in the next chapter.

Review if you liked it :)

Edit: this is a repost because of technical difficulties; if you saw this while it was up last night, I apologize, but I'm not trying to scrounge for readers.


	2. 1,002

_step back and here comes the nighttime_

_~Matt and Kim_

Barton leaves her bouncing uncomfortably in the flatbed for maybe two miles before he pulls the Ford over onto the near-nonexistent shoulder of the winding mountain road and turns around to knock on the back window. It takes Jane a minute or so to untangle her hair from the cables of the hunting bow she's sharing the tarp with, and a minute or so more to work up the nerve to jump over the side of the truck, but then she's on the ground and pulling open the passenger side door.

The mountainous terrain around them is dark, illuminated only by the pale cast of moonlight, and maybe it kind of goes against the rational thinker in her but Jane's always been afraid of forests.

She yanks the door closed behind her, settles the briefcase with the cube in her lap, and sits back uncomfortably while Barton shifts the car into drive. It jerks once, then leaps, and they're moseying their way down the half-gravel road.

Jane's only ever good with silence when her brain's working on something, and right now all it's doing is trying to connect the dots and figure out why in the hell Barton just helped her break out of his employers' secure facility.

"This isn't the kind of car I expected a SHIELD agent to drive," she says. She tries to sound nonchalant, but her voice is strained, and if she's honest she's still breathing a little heavy.

Barton casts her a sideways glance, then looks back out at the road in front of them, lit by the weak yellow headlights. "It's my hunting truck," he says. "I was planning on going hunting tomorrow." Jane gets the feeling that he's blaming her for his trip falling through, for choosing _tonight _to go bat-shit crazy and swipe the Tesseract.

There's some sort of slow country music playing on the radio, a sad song in a woman's voice. It doesn't really fit right, not when Jane's heart is still beating a mile a minute against the inside of her chest.

"So," she begins, her voice a bit awkward due to the fact that she's sitting next to a master assassin, wearing her cartoony-star pajama shorts, "why exactly are you helping me?"

He doesn't bother with glancing at her this time around, just stares stoically at the road ahead, his hands gripping the thin steering wheel with a loose sort of surety. "We shouldn't have kept the damn thing," he answers after a long moment.

Jane had her head tilted down, scraping the nail of her forefinger absently across the stainless-steel surface of the briefcase, but she looks up abruptly at this, her eyebrows drawn together. "What do you mean?" she demands.

The Ford pauses for a moment at a stop sign before pulling out onto the main road, and the song on the radio winds down into the warbling chorus. Barton seems to consider her question for a minute, then says slowly, "It's above your pay grade," and when Jane sits forward in her seat with an indignant retort ready to let fly, "But since you just stole the single most valuable object on the planet, I think I can overlook it."

A beat up Subaru speeds past them in the opposite direction, and for a moment its headlights illuminate the cabin of the truck, and Jane sees that he's grinning, chuckling at her. She snaps her mouth shut and sits back in her seat, letting her head hang back against the headrest, because even if she decides that he might be playing her, leading her into some sort of trap, there's nothing she can really do about it. "Okay," she prompts him.

He sighs heavily, and gets this hardened look in his eye like he's built up walls that won't come down any time soon. "I'm sure you heard about the incident in New York last year," he starts, and doesn't wait for an answer before continuing: "The news didn't have very definitive information, but you work for SHIELD, so you know more about what was going on than the average person – maybe you know that it was your boyfriend's brother Loki who was running around with an army of aliens called the Chitauri."

Now he does pause for some sort of confirmation, so she nods, and maybe he sees it out of the corner of his eye or maybe he sees it in his side-view mirror. "Well," he says, "that little cube made it all possible. Opened a portal through to wherever he was keeping those nasties and let them all in."

If Jane expects some sort of change in the way she feels having the cube in her lap, now she knows it's essentially a weapon of mass destruction, she's disappointed, because weapon or not, it's still the key to understanding everything she's ever studied. Her grip tightens fractionally on the corners of the briefcase, and probably just because of her their proximity to the Tesseract, her palms itch with electricity.

"And," Barton adds, "back during World War Two, that thing nearly won the war for Hitler and his science division, Hydra. Steve Rogers sacrificed himself to take the damn thing down and then there SHIELD goes and dig it up from the bottom of the ocean, just so it can be turned into a weapon _again_."

He falls quiet for a while, and Jane doesn't feel right saying anything, so she just sits and looks out the side window while the main road scrolls by and turns slowly into a freeway. They pass under a sign that reads _Seattle 45 mi,_ and the speedometer behind the steering wheel inches towards 80 mph, because they've past at most two cars this entire time – the entire freeway is bare, lit only slightly by streetlights and the like.

"Tony knows how it is," Barton says at last. "I don't trust SHIELD with that thing." He pulls a sideways face, like a smile at a joke that no one made. "Not that I trust Stark with it, either, but I figure he's at least more reliable than Fury. Especially with the whole Phase Two project still being funded."

"Phase Two?" Jane asks, because she honestly can't see how that project could be a factor, not when everybody on it she's ever met has seemed like they just want to save the world.

He laughs, looks at her incredulously in the rearview mirror. "Phase Two isn't just the clean energy project the higher-ups say it is, Doctor Foster," he says, and his voice would sound amused if he weren't still so frustrated about the whole thing. "They're trying to make weapons. It'll be the next step up from nuclear if they ever figure it out."

Jane leans her head sideways against the window with a _thunk_, and it hurts at first, but the coldness of the glass makes her head feel like it's clearing, gradually – maybe she'll be able to think straight in a couple of hours. "Shit," she whispers. _Seattle 40 mi_ rushes by overhead, and Jane thinks about her car, back in the garage at SHIELD, that she'll probably never see again.

"So what about you?" asks Barton. They coast around a wide bend in the freeway, and Jane watches the white line that marks the shoulder of the road whip by. "Why did you do it?"

She needs a second to ponder it, and when that's done she decides, "I'm not entirely sure." She pulls her head away from the window, and her eyes take more time than she expected to adjust back from the orangeish cast of the streetlamps.

"I guess it's just that I'm a scientist, so I _have_ to have progress," she says, "but we've had the same exact numbers from the cube for _months, _and we still have no idea of its capabilities or what it's even intended for." She's rambling, but Barton basically asked for it, and besides, he went on for like ten minutes anyways. "So I guess I just saw that Tony Stark was in town, and I knew he worked with you guys before with the whole thing in New York, so I thought he could help – at least give me some kind of idea to work off of."

The agent doesn't reply, and she doesn't know why she expected him to. She's sure she sounds just as crazy out loud as she does in her head – and _oh _does she sound crazy in her head, always does –

"Tony will definitely have some ideas," Barton says. "He'll talk your ear off." Jane exhales, honestly relieved, and lets her head back sideways against the window again, her fingers cooled by the steel of the briefcase in her lap. _Seattle, 35 mi_ whizzes past faster than she can read it, and the tiny analog clock set into the dash reads _you should be in bed._

"I'll stop for coffee once we get into the city," she hears Barton's voice, and shakes herself awake a little bit. "I have a feeling we're going to be up for a while."

Barton seems as reluctant to hand off the keys to the Ford as the valet at the Fairmont Olympic is to take them. Jane figures the poor teenager's just used to hundred-thousand dollar Porsches and Mercedes Benzes, not the chipped-red-paint old rust bucket hunting truck. She just stands over by the gold-lit front doors and tries not to look to conspicuous with her giant unsightly combat boots and steaming Starbucks latte while Barton gives the boy an intimidating stare for a full minute.

They push into the lobby through the revolving door, and even though it's nudging two in the morning, there's still a considerable-sized line in front of the check-in desk. This is probably one of the fanciest buildings she's ever been in, complete with absurd amounts of marble and plush red carpet, high hollowed ceilings and a decorative fountain back in the expensive-looking sitting area. She looks sideways and up, but Barton looks completely in his element even though he's dressed like he's completely out of it, a coffee cup carrier complete with three tall cups in one hand and a well-hidden array of knives down one leg.

The front desk grows closer, and people are starting to give them odd looks, whispering obviously behind their hands, but Barton just walks past, on towards the elevator. Jane has to jog to catch up, because she thought they'd stop, so she had, and now he's several paces ahead of her, and the elevator call button's already lit up.

The doors ding open just as she's getting there, and she has to backpedal to keep from hitting the people coming up, so ends up tripping over her own feet and straight into Barton, who's coordinated enough to catch her with one arm without dropping the coffees.

He steps in when the car's cleared out, and she follows him, the briefcase tingling in her right hand. They're the only ones in the elevator when the doors close, and Barton thumbs the button for the top floor.

"Did you call ahead?" Jane asks. She takes a large gulp of her latte, because her eyelids are starting to droop, and ends up burning her tongue.

"No," answers Barton.

"Then how do you know – I mean, you didn't ask at the front desk –"

"He always has the penthouse," he interrupts before her question can get longer than it already is. "He's rich, and it's safer that way. No neighbors to hurt if he blows something up."

The elevator music is soft, and she can barely hear it but it _is _awful. It sounds like Mozart or Beethoven, if you stuffed them down a cat and recorded what came back out, then added some piano. Neither of them say anything more as they ascend; Jane tries to shuffle her feet over the green-and-gold patterned carpet, but she just ends up moving her feet around inside the boots.

They reach the top floor and jolt to a stop, and Jane imagines that they've hit the underside of the hotel roof. With a little _ping_, the doors slide open to reveal a long hallway with gold leaf wallpaper and a single door set into the left wall. Barton makes quickly for the door, and Jane walks somewhat reluctantly behind him.

"Stark!" Barton's banging his fist against the door, shouting. "Open the door, Tony!" Jane hangs warily by his side, and for a moment she wonders _what if this isn't his room, and we're banging on some poor sod's door at this ungodly hour – _

"Why should I?" comes the voice from the other side of the door. She can barely recognize it as the world-famous billionaire's, not when it's groggy and muffled by the door and not like it sounds in press conferences and on talk shows.

"I have coffee," answers Barton, his voice quieter. He holds the coffee cup carrier up by his face so that Stark can see it through the peep-hole.

"So?" is the reply. "I have sleep."

She gets the feeling that this is just a routine, some sort of game that has to go on before they can actually be let in. Another scalding sip of her coffee, and Barton says, "I have the Tesseract."

The penthouse door opens faster than Jane can swallow, and there stands a disgruntled Tony Stark in a grey tee shirt and plaid boxers with a bad case of bed head – the hair and the beard. "What?" he's asking, but he says it more like a statement.

"Tesseract," repeats Barton, and points to it at Jane's side. She raises the briefcase slightly in acknowledgement, and if it weren't so late – _early – _she'd be talking a mile a minute because Tony Stark is one of her scientific idols. Barton holds up the coffee carrier, and reiterates, "Coffee."

Tony's still gazing at the briefcase, but he reaches out and grabs the coffee absently. "Yeah," he says. "We'll probably need this. Long night." He turns around and goes back inside, leaving the door open behind him. Jane gives Barton a look, and he shrugs and steps inside, so she does the same, her boots making more noise than seems like would be normal.

It's dark inside the room, the only light from a small green digital clock to the left and the glowing arc reactor inlaid in Tony's chest. It casts the area – Jane reckons it's the kitchen, because she can make out a microwave, and that looks like a kitchen counter under it – in a pale blue light.

Tony sets the coffee carrier down on the kitchen counter and lifts one out, leaving two; he takes a sip, and then a deep breath. "Okay," he starts. Barton helps himself to one of the barstools at the counter, and reclines uncomfortably against the minimal back. "Okay, first things first, JARVIS –"

A tiny red light comes on from somewhere over in the dark area of the room, and says, "Yes, sir." Jane's awake enough by now, from the coffee, to be adequately surprised. She jumps, and the SHIELD-issue boots squeak on whatever tile or hardwood flooring she's standing on.

Tony looks up and seems to notice her for the first time, standing there with only half of her hair done up in a clip and an oversized sweater that pretty much covers the embarrassing pajama shorts she's got on. "Who're you?" he asks. "Why are you in my hotel room?"

She opens her mouth to answer, but the same voice comes from across the room, "You know who I am, sir, you wrote my programming; I'm just a rather very intelligent system – "

"Not you, JARVIS," says Tony, a bit irritably. He gestures to her, his movements the same tired sort of thing that she's used to seeing from obsessive scientists at obscene hours, "_Her."_

She steps forward, and she planned to hold out a hand for him to shake but she's got both full. "I'm Jane Foster," she says instead. "I'm an astrophysicist at SHIELD, and uh – Thor's girlfriend." It sounds weird coming out of her own mouth; people refer to her as such all the time around the physics department, but she hasn't really thought about it much, not what it really means or if she can even be –

"Ah, yes," says Tony. He comes around the counter, the light slowly getting brighter as he does, and takes her coffee cup from, sets it down, and shakes her hand, not deterred in the slightest that it's her left. "Sorry, I do make it a habit to know smart people who actually think for themselves, but I'm off my game." He waves a hand distractedly up by his head, "There were a lot of Japanese people at dinner tonight, and it was like a mental name-to-face workout.

"Anyways, JARVIS," he goes off in the other direction again, and Jane picks her coffee back up and downs the remainder of it in one gulp – it's cool enough now that it doesn't burn her throat. "Wake Pepper, tell her we've got company – oh, and turn on the lights, but _slowly_."

The lights do start to come on, but they're just a dim sort of flush that seems to come from the walls themselves. Jane considers something for a moment, then goes back over to the front door and kicks off her boots, then rejoins Tony and Barton in the kitchen. She takes the barstool next to Barton and watches while the bed-head billionaire chugs down his coffee and then goes for the next one.

Barton points to the one closest to him. "The other one's for Miss Potts," he says.

Tony makes a sort of nodding motion that seems to mean _fair enough_, and takes the cup he's been told. "Alright," he says, when he's downed at least half. "What does Fury want this time?"

Barton sits forward on his stool. "Nothing," he says. "It's just us."

The other man's eyebrows twist up. There's a noise from the other room, someone running the tap, accompanied by JARVIS' voice. "What do you mean it's just you?" demands Tony. "How can it be just you?"

"We stole it," says Jane, because even when she's fully awake her mouth filter is never on, and she doesn't really ever put things delicately. "The Tesseract."

Tony splutters into the lid of his Starbucks cup, and Barton smiles, but doesn't laugh. "I'm sorry," says Tony. "You _stole _it?"

A door opens back near where JARVIS' light is, and light spills into the main room, illuminating a couple of couches and an absurdly large flat screen television. Someone comes toddling out – a sleepy-looking redhead in a mint green terrycloth robe that was probably supplied by the hotel. "Who stole what?" asks Pepper.

She shuffles towards the kitchen, rubbing her eyes. Her hair is back in a ponytail, and she certainly looks more pulled together than her male counterpart, probably even brushed her teeth before coming out, which is more than can be said of Tony.

Yeah – because he says, "No, not until you've had your coffee," right when she's stepped up to give him a pseudo half-hug kiss thing, and she wrinkles her nose. Nevertheless, she accepts the last coffee cup from him and tests it carefully, takes a regular sip once she knows it's fine.

"Clint," Pepper acknowledges, looking to Barton, who nods back at her. She looks at Jane, and she's about ready to introduce herself when the redhead says, "Doctor Foster." Somehow not surprised at all, given the CEO of Stark Industries' reputation, Jane just smiles in response.

"Yes," says Tony carefully. He peers at Pepper for a long moment, as if gauging whether she's ready or not, then states, "They stole the Tesseract."

Instead of spitting out her coffee, Pepper swallows it too fast and pulls a face. "They _what_?" she asks incredulously. She turns to Jane and Barton, "You _stole _the _Tesseract? _From _Director Fury?"_

For some reason, Jane sees this as the opportune moment to shift the briefcase from her lap up onto the counter, just as the lights in the room reach their limit and stop getting brighter. "Yeah," says Barton. "And if I'm right, we've got about –" he looks at his watch – "five or ten minutes before someone figures out where we took the damn thing and starts looking for it, so."

"Fuck," says Tony, and Jane's brain kicks into overdrive, her eyes darting around the room frantically. But when she stops and though about, she has Tony fricking Stark to work with and five minutes is something like all the time in the world.

"Fridge?" she asks, her eyes on the mini-cooler under the room's coffee-maker.

Tony looks at it quickly, then back up at the briefcase. "No," he says. "They're never lead anymore. What's the briefcase?"

"Stainless steel," says Jane. "But barely half a centimeter – not enough." Barton looks lost, and he doesn't look like he likes being lost, but Pepper's got a sort of exhausted expression on her face like this happens all the time and she's used to it.

"Water?" asks Tony.

Jane thinks for a split second, then nods. "Sink until the bathtub fills up," she decides, and he doesn't argue. He turns on the faucet in the kitchen sink – set into the counter and against the wall – full blast, and Jane pulls the rubber gloves out of her sweater pocket and sets them on the counter for him to use.

She hops down from the barstool. "You ever put this thing in water before?" asks Tony, and she'd say he sounded nervous if he wasn't already pulling on the gloves.

"No," answers Jane. "I'd go with room-temperature, if I were you. Bathroom?"

"Where Pepper came out of," Tony supplies. He pops open the clasps on the briefcase and opens the lid to reveal the luminescent blue cube, sitting obediently in its indentation in the foam setting.

Jane does a sort of sped-up walk jogging over to the door that Pepper left open and turns inside to find herself in a spacious bedroom with lots of modern fixtures all over the place. The bathroom is to her right; it's behind a sliding glass door, and when she steps in there's just more glass – a glass-walled shower and an mirror that covers the entirety of one wall, with bowl-like sinks surrounded by pale beige counter in front of it.

The bathtub is a large Jacuzzi-type, big enough for two or three people to fit in comfortably. She kneels on the foot towel at its side, and reaches for the nozzles, turning up equal amounts of hot and cold. The spigot is one of those fancy ones, that's flat and just lets out a thin stream like a waterfall, and she almost lets herself sit down, take a break, but then she decides to go back out to the kitchen.

"…they'll track it using the gamma it gives off," Tony's explaining to Barton. Pepper has deposited herself on one of the sitting area's couches, and has the television turned on to the very-early-morning news. "Water blocks gamma radiation, to an extent, and the cube gives off so little of it that SHIELD shouldn't be able to see it at all, unless they've developed some new tracking system I don't know about, which they haven't."

Jane reclaims her stool, and slumps forward against the counter. "Bath's running," she says. "I'll take it over in like two minutes."

Tony eyes her – she still looks a mess, and there are probably dark bags coming in under her eyes right about now – but starts to pull off the rubber gloves. "Okay," he says. She accepts the gloves from him, still with a bit of water on them, and pulls them on over her small hands.

Pepper pulls herself up from the couch and comes back over. She deposits her now-empty Starbucks cup in the tiny hotel trashcan. "I'll put another pot on," she says, and starts to do so. Jane's going to go into caffeine overdrive, but that's happened before and she's been fine, so she accepts the mug when Pepper hands it to her.

She takes one sip, and then sets it down on the counter. It's one of those boring hotel mugs – white, with _the Fairmont Olympic _written across the face in ivy green cursive lettering. Tony nurses his own mug, and apparently Barton doesn't drink coffee because he's hasn't touched any all night.

Jane slides off the stool again – she's short enough that there's a bit of a drop to get to the floor. She pads over on bare feet to the sink, and looks down at the cube, somehow majestic in the water, with its blue glow feeding into the area around it. It might be her imagination, but when she reaches in and grabs it, Pepper flinches away.

She draws it up out of the sink, then stands and lets it drip for a few moments; a few drops get on the rug as she walks across it, but they don't sizzle or fizz or anything, just land like normal water. This time she walks slowly, carefully, concentrating more than she should have to.

The bathtub is near-full, and when she kneels and sets the Tesseract inside, her arms go in up to her shoulders before the cube hits the bottom, so she has to drop it the last couple of inches. She squeezes her eyes shut, but nothing explodes – it just makes a clunking sound and then lies still.

Her sweater is soaked, now – she didn't think that through at all – so she removes her gloves, then pulls it over her head and is left in a black v-neck tee shirt. The sleeves of that are wet, too, but she's not about to strip down to her bra, so she'll just have to wait for them to dry out.

The tub fills to the top, and she turns the faucet off; it's suddenly silent in the small bathroom, and for some reason she can't even hear the others talking, can't hear the newscasters from the giant-screen television. Something keeps her kneeling there, won't let her leave the room, and she inhales deeply, exhales and realizes that her heartbeat is louder than it's ever been, in her arms and her legs and her head.

The Tesseract sits tantalizingly close, just at the bottom of the Jacuzzi. Her fingers itch, and she can't shake the tunnel vision, can't seem to look anywhere but at the _what if – _and someone should really come in right now and pull her away, lock her up like Barton could've earlier –

She doesn't realize what she's doing until her arm is in the lukewarm water again, and her bare fingertips are resting on the top of the cube. A shock races up her arm, shakes her to her core but feels _wonderful_.

Jane yanks her arm back whip-fast, spraying a wide arc of water against the bathroom wall. Everything rushes back at once; her heartbeat quiets and the newscaster drones on over the television.

There's a shout from the other room – it sounds like Tony – and a familiar voice bellows, "_Man of Iron!"_

She doesn't so much as breathe as she stumbles to her feet and out of the room, her fingers smarting and her head spinning like she's just gone through astronaut camp all over again. She catches herself in the doorway to the bathroom, and there, sitting on the couch with their backs to her, are two people, in the most absurd medieval-looking getups she's ever seen.

two, one thousand

A?N: I'm trying to do NaNoWriMo this month, so anything that's posted probably won't be for at least another week. Sincerest apologies, especially for the fact that there's only sort of Loki in this chapter, and because the end is kind of rushed.

Reviews mean you liked it :)


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